The Glass Castle: A Memoir by Jeannette Walls

A deeply moving, unforgettable memoir of a truly hard-scrabble life. What I admire most about this book is that Jeannette Walls never paints her family as victims. Nor does she portray her unbearably narcissistic parents as evil (even though it would certainly be easy to do so–her drunken father, her childlike mother. Oh, how I was enraged in the scene where the mother hides the candy bar she’s eating from her starving children!!!). Instead, she shows the world as she saw it growing up: the good, the bad, the hideously ugly.

But mostly this is a book about hope and strength and finding the courage to overcome.